Thursday, October 31, 2013

Batshit

On Scriptnotes a few weeks ago they read from a reader submission: 'Batshit'.  Here is an idea for a completely different short film with the same title.

Basically, it would be the story of a parent catching something like Hendra virus from you know what (I saw today that SARS was probably caught from bats originally).  They would be survived by one modern young person.  The doctor's inability to cope and the poor suffer would be mirrored by the overwhelmed young person reaching deep into their vocab and coming up with a rueful, marvelling 'batshit'.

I recently rewatched the 'Neon Genesis: Evangelion' series, and I enjoyed it very much, although the final couple of episodes are pretty hard to take. I found the bleak world view fit my current mood very much.  This story idea is probably very sophomoric.

Sunday, October 27, 2013

What an age we live in...

Here are some things that can be had for the price of admission to the internet:
Coursera:
+Kierkegaard on Irony
+Interactive Python Programs (simple graphical games)
+General Game Players
+Compilers
+Programming languages (really about functional programming)
+Algorithms (Bob Sedgewick!)
And much more!

ITunes:
+All of Bert Dreyfus on Heidegger and the other existentialists.
+A History of Electronic Music podcast
+Yale's basic Game Theory, intro to New Testament, Evolution ecology and behavior course.
+MITs biology course by Weinberg and Lander
+lots of other great things.

Others:
+A lot of out of copyright books, including most of the notable ancient philosophers. Still looking for a free Heraclitus - if you spot one, let me know.
+Hegel explicated by J Bernstein at Bernsteintapes.com.

Open source software:
+MythTV - just recently got the beta client for Android and its pretty cool to stream to a handy device - although I'm wishing we had a Nexus 7 instead of an iPad.  Will try Torc on our iDevices soon.
+Python, Numpy, Scipy
+Java, Android SDK
+

And of course, blogs.  Anyone who has time is immeasurably richer than they were twenty years ago.

Wishing

Acquisitiveness log, stardate I don't really care for Star Trek:
1.  I recently started using Runkeeper to track my bike commute, and have been enjoying it.  I'd like to add a heart rate, and the way to do it seems to be with a Bluetooth 4.0 (Smart) heart rate monitor.  Best value chest strap is probably Jarv ($57 at Fishpond.com). I'd like to avoid a chest strap and have fancied the Mio Alpha (bluetooth version, not Ant+) since I first heard of it.  $190 from eBay seller in Hong Kong.

2.  I recently bought and rewatched Neon Genesis: Evangelion.  Such a great series. Under all the cartoonish  teenage philosophy, psychology, sexuality and angst there is Gendo Ikari, a man living at war with what is. (Man, those last two episodes are the greatest RickRoll ever - once you know what happened and see the End of Evangelion movies you can see there's sincere creative effort there, but gosh). Another anime great is Star Blazers is available on eBay for $66.60, and I'd like to go there next.

3. I'd like to upgrade our monitor on mythtv to a 27" IPS screen.  I like the AOC 2757 3d version ($360 @ MSY), because the very high refresh rate needed for 3d can be useful in 2d formats.  Not sure if thus specific monitor supports Lightboost, but just a high refresh rate on a large screen is easier on the eyes.  IPS has wider viewing angles and more and more accurate color.  Also worth a look, the Kogan versions, although they are WQHD which is more than I need.  Still waiting for the full capabilities of my Radeon 7790 to be available to Mythtv in Ubuntu.

4.  There are a lot of Gene Wolfe books I don't own.

5.  Thinking about a Kaveri CPU upgrade in the new year.  Asrock has some nice FM2+ motherboards at MSY already. Intel CPUs are better, but maybe Dual Graphics will ultimately work.

6.  I would need new runners and an armband for my phone to get into running training.

But this is all a bit moot because baby no2 is coming down the shoot and we're moving to a larger house and savings must be found.

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Game semantics and dialectics

Giorgio Japaridze has suggested an interpretation of dynamic logic as representable as game semantics, the stuff of game theory.  Games are minimal worlds in which there are agents, objects, spaces, and it makes intuitive sense that dynamic logic (which tries to make logic marry up with  real world activity) and game semantics would be closely aligned projects.

I would add Hegel's approach to dialectics to this group. He makes an move, presents reality's counter, makes another move and so on, until he gets to people and completes the analysis of master and servant.  The servant is in the position of great consciousness for the servant must master himself and the whole world, while the master has only desire and violence.  The submission quickly becomes only a part of what the servant is doing.

A long time ago now, people would ask in exasperation what game I was playing. That question - what game is it? - is fundamental.  'What game are we playing?' could be a candidate for game zero, the game of which all other games are sub-games.  I recently commented somewhere that the only positive evidence of something beyond the greedy-pig-athon of modern economic life was the Bill Gates move of saying 'enough winning - what else have you got?'. Of course, that undersells Melinda Gates' Catholicism.  He was made alive to the reality that thousands of people die for lack of $5, $20, $50 interventions, and looking around in exasperation for the people holding all the dollars, was able to see himself.  Good on him. He's making universality game zero.

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Linux Graphics

So you decided to get a Radeon 7790 and hope for the best...

Briefly, Michael Larabel at Phoronix recommends that you use Fedora 19/20, and he is probably right.  The Linux graphics stack is complex ( http://blog.mecheye.net/2012/06/the-linux-graphics-stack/) with a lot of software components and interfaces. Fedora are packaging mostly the latest drivers with most of the functional options switched on (key option is vdpau).  The radeonsi driver used by the very new cards is still a bit rough around the edges. 4,5,6000 series cards seem to be working well for people on the r600 radeon driver.

Ubuntu (in 13.10B) are not yet so up to date.  There is a ppa (oibaf) for up to 13.04 that will enable what you need, but you need to add the latest kernel yourself.  Xorg-edgers don't seem to compile for vdpau, although that may (have) change(d). 

I tried Suse and found it very good, but strongest at things (virtualization) that I cared least about. I gave up when I couldn't sudo alsamixer while in the folder which had the alsamixer binary. Still don't know why...

It is certainly possible to download and compile the complete graphics stack, but it is onerous, and requires some manual config and library binding which is a bit of a black art to me.

At the moment, my $150 video card is an obstruction and I can't smoothly play back even over-the-air HDTV, which is 720p or 1080i at most.  Nuts.  I could possibly get better performance from the onboard radeon hd4000, a tiny little chip.

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

The Secret of the Universe

A friend was telling me about another friend's experience as a prison psych working with sex offenders. Many will say anything to get out and offend again.  My friend was marvelling at such an encounter with evil. It's hard to change someone who has found the secret of the universe. 

That secret is power.  Feminists often sometimes say rape is all about power and not about sex.  I can understand that reduction in a rape and murder, or domestic violence.  I think there is some performance aspect.  In the case of a rape I think it is more a ritual closing of the breach between power and desire.  It is expressing the truest thing the rapist knows, their understanding of how things are. Those with more power run over those with less. The desires of those with more power are satisfied, the desires of those with less go begging. The opportunity to be him who has power is beyond price - if you have no alternate resource for understanding the world.  This might be the same for people in the bdsm community - by playing out the awful truth of the world, they can be reunited with the world.